Have a whale of a time on the family summer vacation

There is no fun like family fun, and there is no family fun like a family summer vacation -- a chance to spend a big wad of time with your loved ones, as opposed to people you actually like.

But where should you go this year? How about a foreign country? Sounds exciting, but before you travel abroad, you should check with the U.S. State Department, which is currently advising Americans to avoid the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Canada, Mexico and Antarctica, because, in the words of the State Department advisory, "everybody in these places wants to kill you." Colin Powell will personally be vacationing in his basement.

But this doesn't mean you can't have a fun family vacation! There are plenty of overlooked destinations right here in the United States. North Dakota, for example, is one of the most overlooked destinations on the planet. Why not go there? They LOVE visitors. I went up to Grand Forks, N.D., last January, and they were so excited that they named a sewage pumping station after me. Maybe they'll do the same for you! Even if they don't, you could take your family to see my station. (Tip: Do not breathe.) After that, you could visit the many other attractions in the North Dakota region, such as ... OK, such as South Dakota. Then the next day you could ... well, you could check out my sewage pumping station again. This would be WAY cheaper than Disney World.

Wherever you go on your vacation, you'll need to decide whether to fly or drive. Perhaps you, like many Americans, are nervous about air travel. But statistics show that, if you buy a ticket on a commercial flight, the odds are less than one in 17 million that you will be allowed to actually board the airplane. This is because airport security is VERY strict. Recently, I was in the Cincinnati airport, and I watched as the security-checkpoint workers gave a serious going-over to -- I am not making this up -- a pilot. He was in his pilot uniform, minus his belt and shoes, holding his arms out, getting thoroughly wanded while having an animated discussion with the security people. I wasn't close enough to hear what they were saying, but I imagine it went something like this:

PILOT: But I'm a pilot. I'm the person who will be flying the airplane.

SECURITY PERSON: Yes, but suppose you're carrying concealed manicure scissors? You could use them to overcome yourself!

PILOT: Yikes! Better give me a full cavity search!

If you do manage to get on an airplane, you have absolutely nothing to worry about during your flight, except of course the possibility of ramming a whale. This almost happened to a plane last summer in Alaska, according to a story in the Juneau Empire written by Kathy Dye and sent in by several alert readers. The story states that a floatplane was zipping across the water, about to take off, when a major humpback whale shot into the air directly ahead.

Fortunately, the pilot was able to avoid the whale, but the next pilot might not be so lucky. Marine biologists do not know (or, if they DO know, they have not told me) exactly how high a whale can jump. But if we assume a worst-case scenario -- a horny teen-age male whale, trying to impress an attractive female -- a vertical leap of 35,000 feet does not seem to be out of the question. For all we know, the so-called "turbulence" that planes often encounter during flights is actually the pilots dodging airborne whales -- many of which, by the way, have NOT gone through metal detectors, which means they could be carrying scissors.

So maybe you should take your family vacation by car. The beauty of auto travel is that it gives your family a chance to spend "quality time" together in a confined space, hour after quality hour, until you want to yank out all your DNA strands individually by the roots and hurl them out the window. Car travel also gives you a chance to get an "up close" look at this great country, and find out what folks in other regions are thinking.

One thing they're thinking is that they can charge you nearly two bucks a gallon for gas.

This will give Dad something to seethe and mutter about for hundreds of miles at a stretch, until he becomes so rigid with indignation that he cannot unclench his hands from the steering wheel, and has to sleep in the car. Make sure he parks it under a protective structure, because some of these whales come down pretty far inland.